The Mating.
“Yes, I have to be a bit careful,” Ben Halse was saying. “You see, I’ve got up a bit of a name—well, all we old-time traders were tarred with the same brush. I could name more than one who made his pile on the same terms; I could also name a big firm or two in Natal who has made a bigger pile on the same terms. However, we’re not running this load into the country, but out of it.”
The speaker and Alaric Denham were helping to load up a waggon, part of the contents of which were consigned for shipment at Durban. One important item of the load was a case containing the record koodoo head. There were other specimens, too, which Denham had collected.
The latter had been Ben Halse’s guest about three weeks now, and as he had only just got up his outfit, and luggage in general, from the coast port it looked as though he were destined to prolong his sojourn for some time. And, indeed, from his point of view, there was every inducement for doing so. He and the trader had taken greatly to each other, and once when he had mooted the idea of leaving the other would not hear of it.
“We seem all jolly together,” Ben Halse had said, in his bluff, straightforward way. “You take us as you find us, and you seem to me a man who would fit in anywhere. Further, you have got into a queer part of the world such as you may never get into again. You are collecting new things every day. So why hurry? You are welcome as long as you can stick it.”
To which Denham had replied that he had enjoyed every day of his stay as he had seldom if ever enjoyed anything; and he would give himself plenty of time to wear out his welcome. And he and his host had sealed the compact then and there over a glass of grog.
Now he said—
“I shall be relieved when this load is fairly on board. That head, you know, is a sort of a nightmare. All the rest put together isn’t in with it.”
“Oh, you can trust Charlie Newnes,” said the trader. “He’s a straight, reliable man as ever was—a darn sight more so than lots of men who are quite white—and stands well with those who baas this show now. I was shooting what I chose here in these parts when these new officials—damn them!—were being licked at school, before ever they dreamed of coming here to tell an old up-country man like me that he mustn’t shoot this and mustn’t shoot that. I don’t know what the devil we’re all coming to. Oh, here is Charlie.”
A tall, well-set-up young fellow appeared on the scene. He was the son of a well-known old-time trader by a Zulu wife, but in him the European had predominated to such an extent that outside Africa he might have passed for a white man. There was, however, a certain lithe suppleness about his walk and movements that would have given him away in a moment to any South African not of the town born and bred.